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A Vegan Taste of the Middle East Available mail order, post free, from the following address: |
Linda Majzlik's A Vegan Taste of the Middle East is the eighth in her series of vegan cookbooks. This latest addition is a compact and neatly presented paperback. The text is essentially a continuous list of recipes - title, ingredients, instructions - plus a scattering of black and white illustrations. The disadvantage with this layout is that recipes can get fragmented at any point, leaving you to turn the page with potentially messy fingers to find out the remaining ingredients or the next instruction.
The 100 plus recipes make imaginative use of a wide range of Middle Eastern staple foods and flavours, from apricots, dates and figs to herbs and spices such as mint, coriander, cardamom and cumin, through to barley, bulgar wheat and chickpeas. In fact, you may find you already have most of the ingredients for a Middle Eastern 'store cupboard'.
Each chapter has a short introduction describing how food forms part of everyday life in the Middle East. For example, the book includes an interesting section on mezze, the Middle Eastern sociable 'starter' of mixed savoury dishes like aubergine and walnut koftas, spinach and pistachio pastries and stuffed vine leaves.
For those cooks looking to add to their soup collection, A Vegan Taste of the Middle East offers a number of ideas - the quick and easy celeriac and orange soup is recommended, especially on a cold winter's day. As well as standard cookbook chapters on main courses, salads and desserts, this publication also provides a short section on Middle Eastern breads and flatbreads, and another on refreshing drinks, such as pineapple and orange sharbat, for hot desert temperatures.
In addition to the soup mentioned above, a number of other recipes were tested in the interests of this review, with varying degrees of success. We felt the falafel could have been improved by finer mincing and/or sautéing of the onion before mixing with the chickpeas etc., since our version contained some raw onion after cooking. The minted cucumber and yogurt dressing, however, was a pleasant accompaniment to the falafel and no doubt also other types of mezze. The minted flatbread was simple to prepare - remember you must allow one and a half hours for it to rise - and it would have tasted a lot nicer if this reviewer hadn't overcooked it! The banana and almond bread was tasty, if a little rubbery, but this might have been down to having to improvise with some of the ingredients.
This is an unfussy cookbook and is good value at £5.99. The recipes use widely available ingredients and most are straightforward and relatively easy to prepare. The method accompanying each list of ingredients tends to consist of just one or two concise paragraphs, so a little basic culinary experience is required to help with some of the recipes.
Other titles in this series include: A Vegan Taste of .... the Caribbean, Italy, India and Mexico - all yet to be tried and tasted. Further information about these and other publications of interest to vegans and vegetarians can be found in the free up-to-date catalogue available from Jon Carpenter Publishing at the above address.